Mark Hinson, Tallahassee Democrat May 22, 2014
Lucinda Williams once chased Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.
We’re not talking metaphorical literary peacocks, either.
When Williams was kindergarten age in the late ‘50s, she and her father, the poet Miller Williams, drove from Macon, Ga., to Milledgeville, Ga., to visit the great Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor as invited guests.
“She had a strict daily schedule when she was writing,” Williams said last week during a free-flowing, hour-long phone chat from the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter’s home in California. “She wasn’t ready to receive guests when we got there so we sat on the porch until she finished writing. I chased her peacocks all around the yard. My father loves to tell that story.”
About 10 years later, Williams picked up a few books written by O’Connor. She was floored by O’Connor’s darkly humorous vision of a South populated with drunks, false prophets, deformed outsiders, religious zealots, polite killers and lost souls.
“Her stuff influenced and inspired me,” Williams, 61, said in her distinctively raspy voice. “I read all of it. I just devoured it. I related to it. It just seemed so real to me. I had seen these people. They were real people to me. … My song ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is straight from Flannery O’Connor.”
Then Williams began to whisper-sing the lyrics: “You will fall from grace/ You may never see his face/ He was out of heaven/ Something wicked this way comes.”
Well, her two grandfathers were Southern Methodist ministers, so she comes about it honestly. No wonder her next album, due for a release in September, is titled “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.”